Reborn as a DRAGON by Immortal_Simo

Reborn as A dragon is a reincarnation story where a man is born into a family of dragons on another world.

Plot and Theme: This is an exploration/slice of life/cultivation story based around a dragon's life. There is exploration of the internal landscape, but its minimal. The strength of the story is in its exploration of the world and the social interactions between dragons and other species.

Good points: Its refreshing. The author creates an entire world around the story's protagonist. The story doesn't sugarcoat the Dragon Supremacy culture. The ultra rigid society reminds this reader of Sparta: only the strongest and most fit survive. Everyone else is a rival, a source of food, or a pest. Dragons are not human. They don't have human morals. The reader will find brutality but discovery as well. The protagonist might, eventually, have moments of insanity some will confuse with mercy.

Bad Points: The prose and style. I kid you not. The prose is something written with no care to style. It is beyond amateur and more than a little lazy. As/while conjunction abuse, rigid structure, telling vs showing, gerunds, bloating (excessive wordiness for simple concepts), lack of significant description, Point of View bouncing, tense slips, passive voice vs active voice, basic orthography, punctuation, etc. In fact, this work doesn't miss a single bump. It holds on to literary problems like an alcoholic to Jack Daniels.

1. As/While abuse. As/while subordinate conjunctions are abused in order to speed the narrative along without care for how many times they are repeated. There are other words out there.

2. Rigid structure. The style has a general repetitive sentence structure. 'Subordinate conjunction, Independent clause.'

Example: "As I thought about what to do, I started yawning." as opposed to "I yawned and considered my options."

Feel the weight of the sentence in your head. It isn't pleasant. This particular style controls most of the narrative. It repetition becomes a problem and might put-off many a reader. If something is important enough to be included in a story (subordinate conjunction), it could be separated into its own independent clause (independent clause).

3. Gerunds. I won't teach basic creative writing here. Do a search in Google for "Gerunds in prose." Let's just say that the general rule (and all rules are meant to be broken when one knows what they are doing) is to NOT use them. Gerunds, combined with as/while repetition AND subordinate conjunctions are a pain to read.

4. PoV problems. Point of Views are tricky. Most fiction is written in 3rd Person Limited PoV or 1st Person PoV. I've seen, rarely, a well conducted 3rd Person Omniscient PoV that slips through with almost no issues.

Example: 1st person: I breathed fire. My right claw rended through eldritch flesh.

Example: 3rd Person Limited: Terrac breathed fire. His right claw cleaved through eldritch flesh.

Example: 3rd Person Omniscient (Multiple views) : Terrac breathed fire (1). The eldritch horror was terrified (2 and Telling). Sparky the dog wanted to pee (3), but he barked at both the dragon and the eldritch horror with brave stupidity. Unknown to all three of them (Sub conjunction), the loss of any of them would disrupt reality. (Ind. Clause). (God/Author PoV)

An author must try to limit 3rd Person Omniscient to subtle shifts, otherwise it feels clumsy and harms a story's pacing.

5. Telling vs showing. Yes the story has this problem in spades. Telling is direct and (if not given enough thought) lazy. Showing is INDIRECT. It is also, in most cases, wordier but builds better, flows better.

Example Telling: Adeline was cold.

Example showing: Adeline shivered.

Example showing with details: Adeline shivered despite the heavy winter coat.

6. Began to. Started to. Seems to. Appears to. I might despise As/while subordinate conjunction abuse but "began/started to/seems to" bloating and ambiguity is up there. These phrases are used by authors to organize their thoughts. They are unnecessary preambles to other clauses in a sentence. Remove them from the prose except in specific contexts.

Example: Terrac began to consider the possibilities of murder as Arnold rambled on, convinced of his own importance.

Example WITHOUT the bullcrap: Arnold rambled on, convinced of his own importance. Terrac pondered abject murder.

Notice that I used 3rd Person omniscient, but it feels like 3rd Person limited. Terrac observing Arnold. That's subtle manipulation of prose and style. Notice that I removed the as/while conjunction. Notice that the "Began to" preamble is gone. Notice that I am TELLING instead of Showing, but the prose isn't harmed by the choice because one sentence has long phonetic prosody and the other is short and to the point. More importantly, the details provide an understanding of the characters and aren't boring. One is a snotty jackarse. The other might be a snarky SoB or, in truth, a cold blooded murderer.

I don't have the patience to detail examples of all the other problems in this work. This isn't a creative writing class. Let's leave this at the point that I am EXTREMELY displeased with the rough prose because the story has great potential. This work can be much, much better.

2.5 / 5 stars. Fifty percent. Not high enough to be average, not low enough for complete anonimity.

Not to worry I found it



Author will posting soon as per above message as someone asked about the new chapter in offical site